This concluding chapter reflects on the volume’s contributions to how we see, think, and do international organisations. The editors of this volume draw a sharp distinction between doing international organisations law and thinking about international organisations, and propose that the discipline must ‘start seeing international organisations differently’. Yet the sequence could just as easily be reversed: what one sees will inevitably be shaped by what one thinks, how one imagines the world, what one expects to see. This chapter begins with ‘ways of doing’ scholarship on international organisations – crudely divided into ‘deconstructivist’ and ‘(re)constructivist’ approaches – and proceeds to reflect on the diverse ways of seeing and thinking suggested by the preceding chapters, before making some tentative suggestions about possible ways forward.

In the shifting context of global policy making, International Organisations (IOs) have become powerful sources of expert authority and central sites for the exercise of power in global governance. While we have a clear understanding of how IOs deploy expertise, there has been relatively little effort among legal scholarship and International Relations to critically examine the processes by which such institutions produce and validate knowledge claims about governance objects and, in doing so, authorise certain solutions as the only ‘viable’. This chapter examines the way in which the World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, and UNICEF acted as central vehicles in defining the contours of ‘hidden hunger’ as a ‘matter of fact’ – or as a medicalised and economised object of governance. It shows how this problematisation largely validated the prioritisation of short-term responses and easily measurable programmes such as food fortification and vitamin supplementation in Global South countries. Rather than addressing the underlying socio-economic determinants of the problem, such responses acted as political analgesics providing temporarily relief. In highlighting how IOs’ ‘ways of seeing’ are connected to the practice of governing, the chapter sheds light on the everyday politics of rule-making.

This chapter proposes to study the making and stabilisation of expertise in global governance. While doing so, it questions mainstream approaches in international law and International Relations, which see international organisations’ reliance on expertise as a rationalisation of global politics. The approach taken here proposes, instead, to examine the political processes and decisions that participate in the production and assembling of ‘expertise’ in global governance. It proposes that the power–knowledge nexus in global fora can be explored by taking the following (complementary) entry points: focusing on sites and networks of knowledge production, studying infrastructures of knowledge production, or analysing relations between people and/or between people and the material.

Like any other institutions, international courts are both constrained and free, structured and open-ended in their production of legal outcomes. Yet, after decades of investigation, the driving forces behind international adjudication remain somewhat elusive. If international norms are textually indeterminate, then what guides their interpretation and application to concrete cases? To what systemic pressures are courts subject? And what forms of discretion do they enjoy? This chapter begins to answer these questions by focusing on the micro-level practices, relationships, and struggles of the legal experts populating international judicial institutions. On the one hand, these socio-professional dynamics are constrained by existing social arrangements, including the institutional design of courts, the networked interactions among individual actors, and the competent performances that punctuate the adjudicative process. On the other hand, existing social arrangements are open to contestation, renegotiation, and contingency, thereby creating opportunities for unorthodox and creative lawyering. As such, the socio-professional dynamics that take place inside international courts are both the vehicle of reproduction of legal outcomes and the source from which legal change originates.

In the post-World War II era, international lawyers have occupied the front seat in the study of international organisations (IOs). During the past decade, this disciplinary hierarchy has grown to feel increasingly unsatisfying. This chapter offers an anthropological take on the study of IOs building both on the past decade of anthropological work and my ethnography at the UN Human Rights Committee. IOs are frequently accused of ineffectiveness embedded in endless paper-pushing techniques. In this chapter, I engage with these criticisms and ask: can we find another perspective from which to assess effectiveness? What happens if we stop investing our analytical attention in what we think IO operations and their desired ‘impacts’ should be and instead engage in non-normative inquiries into what IOs actually do? I explore what can we learn about IOs’ visions for world improvement by focusing on the legal technicalities and material forms that define their operations. I propose that, instead of a hindrance or distraction, these forms embody ‘standards for a better world’ that are an essential component of IOs’ civilising mission.

In 2015, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty Philip Alston stated that the World Bank treats “human rights more like an infectious disease than universal values and obligations” because of its understanding of what constitutes political interference. The World Bank’s interpretation, replicated by the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) in the development finance regime complex, has shaped how activists hold the Banks to account. This chapter examines how the international accountability norm emerged through contestation with the World Bank and spread to be taken as given for the MDBs, as distinct from international human rights and environmental elemental regimes. It then documents how activists seek to protect human and environmental rights through the banks’ international accountability mechanisms as quasi-legal processes with implications for the banks’ culpability. Although there is an increasing recognition of some rights such as free, prior and informed consent and labour, the banks continue to view these as internal standards not legal obligations. The chapter then examines the extent to which the norm needs to be backed by hard law to be enforced, with efforts by the banks to maintain their international organisation immunity given legal claims as to their implication in human and environmental rights abuses.

This chapter re-inserts the (rethought) concept of territory into the legal-theoretical framework, offering a look at how this concept can be realised and might differently operationalise concepts such as sovereignty and jurisdiction. Taking the concept of sovereignty first, the chapter operationalises this concept as a bundle of legal rights, duties, etc. informed by legal realist methods and social constructivism. The chapter then turns to the concept of jurisdiction, problematising the ‘boundaries’ of and reterritorialising extraterritorial jurisdiction. The chapter offers an alternative to the ‘ownership’ and ‘exclusive’ model of legal rights, which otherwise has at its core a reified and flat territory. The final part explores actorhood, demonstrating how the spaces of international organisations can be understood as their territories. Taking as its starting point the possibility of territorial pluralism, multiplicity, and continuous (re)production, the chapter ends with an account of territories proliferating rather than diminishing. Taking the idea of reterritorialising seriously, it proposes a legal account of the relationship between actors and their spaces.

Chapter 2 provides an overview and critique of discourses about deterritorialisation in international law. The first sections sketch out three main strands to these discourses. The first strand contains accounts of a fundamental transition in the organising logic of international law; a shift from ordering competences on the basis of territory to functions. The second strand groups together accounts addressing the relocation of power but containing imprecise and undertheorised understandings of these spaces. The third strand includes accounts concerning the porosity of states. The chapter then problematises these discourses. Each strand applies a similar legal-spatial imaginary, and in so doing omits the resulting spaces produced by deterritorialisation. Common to all is a tendency to continue to applying a particular and unproblematised concept of territory, limiting theoretical insight, consistently producing deterritorialisation without reterritorialisation, and often conflating at an analytical level actors, spaces, and functions. The reason for this again lies in the continuing prioritisation of the stato-centric approach to territory in international law’s implicit geography.

Chapter 2 analyses the negotiation of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC, 1998–2003). It illustrates that evidence was a key element of the negotiations and argues that the FCTC was developed as an evidence-based treaty to counteract the attacks on evidence by the tobacco industry. After a historical introduction, Section 2.2 outlines the theoretical background of the chapter, introducing the notion of ‘treaty entrepreneurs’. Sections 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 proceed to delineate and analyse how the strategy on evidence unfolded during the FCTC negotiations. Section 2.3 illustrates how legal expertise from international environmental law was borrowed to build a treaty that could embed and develop evidence. Section 2.4 describes how evidence was mobilised to build the treaty. First, the treaty entrepreneurs relied on existing knowledge within the WHO; second, they served as a catalyst for the production of additional evidence from other relevant actors, most notably the World Bank. Section 2.5 reviews how the treaty entrepreneurs framed the available evidence and how the label ‘evidence-based’ started being used. Section 2.6, finally, draws some conclusions on the implications of adopting a strategy on evidence to push forward the negotiations of a treaty.

The final chapter 8 considers the implications of an aesthetic analysis of images for international legal practice. International bodies making decisions under the three treaties examined in the book conflate and displace aesthetic value in favour of other environmental values, risking the integrity of their decisions and, ultimately, the protection of the environment for its aesthetic value under international environmental law. Photographs could be formally acknowledged for their relevance to the interpretation of the treaties and used in decision-making processes to conceive aesthetic appreciation of the environment in ways important for all nation states. They can encapsulate a sensorial experience of the natural environment shaped by imagination, emotion and knowledge from different cultures. But a critical analysis of such images is also important to distinguish aesthetic value from other environmental values such as natural beauty, cultural value and ethical value. An accommodation of aesthetic concepts and methods to develop meanings from images for the interpretation of international environmental treaties could also be taken up for other fields of international law.

This chapter explores the legality of the IMF’s shift in mandate, and considers the overarching question of whether the institution was legally entitled to expand its mandate over time through de facto legal doctrines rather than express or implied consent of the members. The analysis begins with a consideration of the legal basis of the Fund’s initiative by examining the international legal theory on the legal personality of international organisations. That is, whether the mandate of an international organization is strictly dependant on the wording of its constitutive instrument(s), or whether the mandate can evolve so as to accommodate new de facto attributions and competences. The Fund’s mandate shift is then tested by taking into account the power of soft law. A key aspect in the legal literature is whether the constituent doctrine of ‘separate will’ or ‘volonté distincte’, which allows an organisation to act independently – that is without the express or implied consent of members – would apply to the mandate expansion as the move ensured the Fund maintained relevancy in an ever-changing world. Finally, the chapter concludes that the Fund’s mandate expansion was in line with the standards of international law applicable to international organisations.

States often need to cooperate with each another to address legal and other issues of common concern across many fields in an interdependent world. International organisations (‘IOs’) emerged in the 19th century as a means of intensifying and permanently institutionalising international cooperation, through bodies with an international legal personality, and functions and powers, separate from their member states. While the earliest IOs had a narrow technical focus, the League of Nations (1919–46) and United Nations (since 1945) reflect a more ambitious global agenda of broad-spectrum cooperation. The proliferation of IOs has generated some key legal issues which this chapter explores: how to define IOs; the nature, extent and consequences of their international legal personality; their powers, immunities and privileges; and the scope of their legal responsibility for their conduct. There is a special focus on the United Nations, as a universal IO with competence in many areas of international life and human activity, and from whose establishment and practice much of the international law of IOs has emerged.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties 1969 contains the body of rules governing the law of treaties. Its scope covers treaties between states. The rules largely reflect customary international law. So even where states are not parties to the Convention, its rules will often apply to their treaty relations by virtue of customary international law. Treaties between a state and an international organisation, or between international organisations, are not covered by the 1969 Convention. But international organisations may be party to the separate Vienna Convention of 1986, which adapts the rules of the 1969 Convention to international organisations. If they are not parties to the 1986 Convention, customary international law will apply to their treaty relations. The 1969 Convention does not cover oral agreements, which are in any case extremely rare. The 1969 Convention does not have retrospective effect. The implications of this are discussed.